by H. E. Trent
One of the residents of the farm his sister Courtney managed with her lovers had noticed that Ais was missing. Ais had missed lunch, which wasn’t atypical on the farm. Projects became engrossing. Small tasks that started at midday would morph into monsters that required taming until after supper. Owen generally didn’t notice much of anything. He secluded himself at his cottage, tinkering on one project or another so he could keep the communications equipment running. Getting information to Earth about what was happening on the failed colony of Jekh was his top priority. The Terrans never should have gone there. The Jekhans had quietly visited Earth twenty years prior, extended their hands to shake, and quickly had them bound. What the Terrans had done was the equivalent of a large-scale car jacking. He’d seen shit like that all the time in Boston before he’d pulled up stakes and moved to Montana. Some sweet idiot would drive into the wrong ’hood to proselytize or to gather signatures for a petition, and the aggrieved locals would take their wallet and their car.
Owen hadn’t intended to end up on Jekh as one of those “car jackers.” He was there because Courtney had taken a policing job in the city of Buinet. She’d meant to do some investigation about their then-missing grandfather but, Court being Court, she’d found some trouble. Owen and Erin followed, intending to bail Court out. A year later, and they were still on Jekh. Court and Erin had taken Jekhan lovers and chose to stay. Owen hadn’t left because he’d wanted solitude, and figured he’d find some on the sparsely populated alien planet.
He scoffed.
Should have stayed in Montana.
The ground shook and, soon after, more light branded the sky.
“Fuck.” Pausing to catch his bearings, he dropped the machete point-first into the soft ground, turned his wrist over, and then double-tapped the band of his portable COM device.
“Go ahead,” the buttery, computerized voice told him.
“Display location,” he responded.
“Unable to display. Incomplete maps.”
“Triangulate based on last recorded location.”
“Please wait.”
“Never mind.” He double-tapped again to put the COM back in standby, and then grabbed the knife. The last time his COM had told him, “Please wait,” the little computer had crashed twenty seconds later and he’d ended up having do a reboot in safe mode. He needed to upgrade the processor chip again, but hadn’t had time or the right materials. To get what the device required, he’d have to manufacture a chip from odds and ends, and he was too busy helping his little sisters play the Jekh Savior game.
So much for solitude.
He resumed his trudging through the trunks and vines as the sky threatened with increasing frequency.
“I wonder if I should head back to the farm,” he muttered, eying the sickly tinge of the clouds. He’d been hiking nearly three hours. Certainly, someone who’d taken a more direct route would have found Ais already if she were in the area. She always wore a bright white dress, in spite of the frequently dirty work she did on hands and knees. The color lured her, apparently. The local Jekhan doctor—Dorro—said she was the Earth equivalent of legally blind with severe color discernment problems as well, but that white was easy for her to see.
Her eyes could be fixed in time, but there was no way to surgically implant common sense.
The next crash of thunder came right at the heels of a lightning flash. Just like on Earth that meant the storm was getting closer.
“Too fucking close.” Electrocution wasn’t on his bucket list, so he dug deep into his inner well of energy, and picked up as much speed as he could.
Trigrian had said there was a stone path around the mountain base on the side nearest the farm, and he would have known. Court’s lover had been born on the farm. He knew every inch of the property and the bordering lands near the mountain, but no one had cleared those paths in the decades the property had sat vacant. Trigrian had moved to Buinet after his parents died, and then the Terrans invaded. He’d been home for less than two years.
“Finally.” Owen forced himself between two trees and planted his booted foot on the manmade trail. He could jog if he wanted to—could hurry toward that tiny splinter of sunlight and get his ass back to the farm before the sky opened up and drowned him where he stood. He was going to do that, but he heard the whimper.
He stopped.
Swallowed.
Listened.
Come on. Let me hear you again.
There were few large predators anywhere on Jekh. That was one of the reasons an alien race called the Tyneali had seeded their half-human hybrid experiments on the planet. Owen had become quite familiar with the wild beasts of Montana before his hasty relocation and had learned that just because a beast couldn’t easily eat him didn’t mean one wouldn’t want to try. Rabbit bites hurt like a bitch, and so did rabies shots.
Ais may have been reckless, but he wasn’t.
He heard another whimper, and the sound definitely wasn’t a growl or any other noise animals made to warn off other beasts. The breathy, pathetic sound belonged to a woman.
“Hello?” He tightened his grip around the handle of the machete and tipped his head toward where he’d thought the sound had come from. Northeastward would have been his guess, but the wind was picking up and making the orientation ambiguous. “Say something if you’re out there.”
“I…” There came a gasp, then a muffled, “P-please.”
“Ais.” Sighing, he surged ahead.
She sounded as though she were just around the jutting finger of rock. He’d recognize her voice anywhere, in spite of having only heard her speak a handful of times. Her voice was sweetly melodic, though always so halting, both from lack of English practice and likely some genetic defect of her throat. Like the Jekhan race, Ais was an experiment of the Tyneali. She was supposed to be the better hybrid version—more human, more durable, and without all the hormonal deficiencies of the others.
Except for her red eyes and flame-colored cheeks, she looked human enough. She didn’t act human, though. Everyone’s best guess was that she was yet another failed experiment. Failed or not, the people who’d made her still wanted her back. A scoundrel named Reg Devin had stolen her from a lab, and then his ship got stolen—with her inside—by a couple of human friends of the McGarrys who were working for the Jekhan Alliance. The city of Buinet’s police commissioner Lillian Devin—Reg’s mother—frequently monitored space communications from her office. Not only were the Tyneali making inquiries about retrieving Ais, but so were a few pirates looking to make a quick buck on the sex worker market. Lillian wasn’t trying to get Ais back for her son. She was doing everything she could to undo all the dirty deeds he and men like him had done on Jekh.
Like so many others, Ais was a refugee on the Beshni farm and, apparently, she was tangled into a vicious thorny vine just beneath a mountain ledge. Near the path, her woven basket rested on its side, spilling green and red berries onto the ground. She was ensnared about eight feet up the mountain’s face with her belly against the vines on the rock, and barely clinging to a fissure she’d stuffed her fingers into.
The thorns were holding her up, but she could let go. Even after a hard landing, she probably wouldn’t have broken anything. But if she let go, the thorns would dig into her flesh—her face, her belly, her legs.
She’d bleed, and a lot.
“Fuck,” Owen spat.
He ran to the rock, double-tapped his COM, and waited for the prompt. “Court? Erin?”
Without the trees dampening the signal, he should have been able to get a signal to the farm from there. His sisters had stayed at the main house to keep watch in case Ais had returned on her own.
“Did you find her?” came Court’s voice—always so deceptively calm. “Half the search party has already come back. She wasn’t on any of the paths. I even had Murki go ask around in Little Gitano.”
“Call everyone back,” Owen said through gritted teeth. “I found her.”
“P-please,” Ais whined. She writhed ineffectually, apparently trying to get one leg free of the thorny growths, but the long skirt of her dress was tangled up in the vines.
He inched closer, hacking away at the vines at the mountain base. Seeing that her long, black hair was tangled up in the mess, too, he forced air through his teeth. If she’d fallen while waiting for rescue, her hair would have been ripped from her scalp. She may have been stupid for climbing up onto that ledge in the first place, but not so stupid that she couldn’t predict what would happen next.
“Jesus,” he muttered.
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COPYRIGHT AND CREDITS
CRUX
Copyright © 2016 Holley Trent
Excerpt SALVO © 2016 Holley Trent
Copy edits by Tasha Harrison/The Dirty Editor
Proofread by Cassie Hess-Dean
Cover art by Clarissa Yeo of Yocla Designs
All rights reserved. Reproduction of any part of this book in any format, except for passages quoted under fair use for reviewing purposes, is allowed only with prior consent of the author.
Crux is a work of fiction. Names, places, entities, and scenarios in this book are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.